Representing a puzzling trend in the classical music world, pianist heiress Marina Quasha has become a conductor without traditional training. She is now music director of the German-Romantic Orchester and recognized for paying her musicians well.
What does it take to become an orchestra conductor these days? Sometimes all it takes is a love of music and money in the bank.
Jeffrey Arlo Brown writes at the Baffler, “On the evening of February 18, the Deutsch-Romantisches Orchester (DRO) gave a performance in Berlin’s Funkhaus, a one-time radio broadcasting center converted into a chic concert hall. It was a classical concert like any other — except for the guest list, five-course banquet, and glaring mismatch between the skill levels of the professional instrumentalists and their conductor, a relatively unknown young musician named Marina Quasha.
“Just after 7:00 p.m., Quasha strode to the podium in the cavernous concert hall. A kind of gray mist hovered above the orchestra. She gave the audience a tiny combination bow-nod. She then raised her hands and launched into conducting the overture to Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, followed by arias selected from Tosca and Macbeth, and, finally, Brahms’s First Symphony. Her work smacked of inexperience: Beautiful individual solos were undermined by an overall loud, blunt, and sludgy sound, a sign of missing vision and restraint. She let phrases that needed distinction bleed together and neglected the subtle countermelodies that give the music richness. Her hands beat timid time, and the musicians often ignored her tempo — they barely even looked at her.
“After the concert, attendees and musicians alike filed into the banquet hall, where three long tables with thin candles, handwritten place cards, and elegant menus waited. Amid the chatter, a musician gushed about the DRO’s innovative approach to reaching new audiences, as if we weren’t at an invitation-only concert followed by a luxurious dinner. Others, commenting on Quasha’s conducting ability, offered a masterclass in the art of the polite non-compliment. ‘It’s quite an exciting project.’ ‘She has something in her heart.’ ‘We all have room to grow.’ Perhaps they felt reluctant to bite the hand feeding them — and me — [oysters] and citron caviar.
“In between courses, Quasha popped by where I was sitting and mentioned that she was going to Malta, where she was applying for citizenship in the hopes of competing for the country in horse show jumping at the 2028 Olympics.
“Later, I forwarded a recording of the concert to two musicians whose ears I trust without telling them who made it. The first, a pianist, sent me a list of six general problems and thirty-seven significant but more specific issues including timestamps. ‘The moments when the music mostly plays itself were fine,’ he said, ‘but the parts that actually required conducting skills were sorely lacking.’ The second, an accomplished conductor, told me, “I sense that the orchestra doesn’t trust the conductor.’ … Nevertheless, he said, he could tell the conductor was working with ‘an expensive instrument.’
“Expensive, indeed: Quasha later told me the Funkhaus concert had cost over $290,000. Seventy-seven percent of orchestras in the United States had annual budgets under $300,000 in 2022, according to the League of American Orchestras. Why did all this energy, skill, and money flow into a concert led by a conducting neophyte? The answer lies in a concerning trend new to classical music: the rise of pay-to-play, boutique musical experiences for the ultra-wealthy.
“The musical adventuring of socialite-turned-soprano Florence Foster Jenkins and [others] show that rich people never really lost their desire to prove themselves in the musical realm. But the last decade or so has seen a striking rise in pay-to-play arrangements, a situation that recalls the days when orchestras belonged to princes. These experiences allow people with money but little musical ability to roleplay composer and conductor — for a price. This development flows naturally from this era’s extreme inequality as well as classical music’s precarious state, even in such historically generous countries as Germany. It risks reshaping the art itself to align with the whims of wealthy dilettantes.
“Examples abound. In 2012, Alexey Kononenko, a former mathematician at the mysterious hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, began a career as a composer. Despite never having learned to play an instrument, a rudimentary grasp of music theory, and a ratio of inspiration to imitation that would embarrass a large language model, Kononenko, who goes by the stage name Alexey Shor, has had his works performed all over the world by many of its best musicians. …
“Or consider Susan Lim. Last May, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of London Choir, and the outstanding pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet gave a performance of a composition by the surgeon and AI booster, who hired musicians to turn her inchoate ideas about technology into music and allow herself the privilege of calling herself a ‘songwriter.’ The work depicts a stuffed lion’s journey from to inanimate toy to sentient companion by way of lyrics like ‘It’s a beautiful invention / Robotics, artificial intelligence / It’s the new medication.’ …
“All this make-believe art making has an uncanny quality. The concerts look and sound a lot like normal concerts, with professional musicians picking up the wealthy dabbler’s slack. The overall effect is hard to localize at first, but it boils down to this: Rich people are building their own classical music world, one where the long years of intense training, fierce competition, and harrowing precarity musicians endure to master their craft matter less than … cold, hard cash. …
“At least Quasha is giving some musicians sorely needed well-paid gigs. But pay-to-play schemes for wealthy dilettantes risk undermining the important thing in classical music that is still largely working — its commitment to artistic excellence — hollowing it out completely in the process. The danger is partly political: Will cash-strapped governments like Germany’s see projects like the DRO and decide they don’t need to pay for its uniquely diverse publicly funded network of 129 professional orchestras if a rich person is happy to pick up the tab for starting their own?”
More at the Baffler, here. You’re allowed one free article.
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